Plan is to increase our population by about 500k per year(I think about 200K natural growth & 300K immigration).
We already have a housing shortage. They created a 10bil housing fund. Plan is for this fund to... invest in the stock market, and use the interest to fund the construction of 6000 houses a year.
It's a fucking joke.
People talk about Big Australia(govt policy of sharply increasing population) for geopolitical reasons, but I think it's simpler than that. My personal theory is that the govt doesn't want to go into a technical recession and be excoriated in the murdoch press as bad economic managers because they were left holding the previous govts turd sandwich.
The parallels between Australia & Canada are interesting, but i'm curious why the Canadian govt is motivated to do this...
....... ?
Canada's number of permanent and non permanent residents increased by 1 million or so in 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-22/canada-s-...
Permanent visa quotas are indexed as a percentage of population since 15-20 years ago, and it was reduced this year for the first time in ages be 5k less (195->190).
Net overseas migration is commonly touted but that includes citizens/students etc and is just that years entrants - departures: highly affected by recent global disruptions during covid.
Key statistics
Statistics in this release are commonly known as Estimated Resident Population (ERP).
Australia’s population was 26,268,359 people at 31 December 2022.
The quarterly growth was 127,078 people (0.5%).
The annual growth was 496,800 people (1.9%).
Annual natural increase was 109,800 and net overseas migration was 387,000.When the immigrants have equal rights and they get the job, that's a fair meritocracy. Immigrants don't automatically like getting paid less or work in a toxic environment or live in a shitty house, they endure it due to the restrictions on their rights to move and work. In other word, Immigrants are not people who don't know better.
When you limit the immigration, that's like the taxi medallion system which creates a fake shortage which benefits only the medallion holders. You end up with shitty taxis.
There's nothing wrong to be paid fair market wage. I wish we can just abolish this medallion system altogether, people shouldn't be asking for permission to work and travel. This must be an universal human right.
It's all stat juking. They can write bigger budgets because they are allowed to assume $x per immigrant in the economic plans, so increasing immigration means more budget funds.
The problem is that that assumption is highly dependent on who is immigrating. A highly educated healthy person will make a net contribution, others will cost the government and the governments will turn to subsidizing their employment in the private sector to reduce the cost. This becomes wage lowering pressure. Businesses that rely on mass labor get a government subsidized labor force that keeps their local labor in check.